Errol Morris on the set of Standard Operating Procedure Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

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Since completing his masterful first feature Gates of Heaven in 1978, Errol Morris has crafted a series of quirky, hypnotic, genre-changing documentaries. In his quest for filmic truth he abandoned the notion of fly-on-the-wall direct cinema that ruled the non-fiction film landscape in the '60s and '70s for a unique kitchen-sink approach to storytelling that, although often imitated, is rarely surpassed. Part private investigator, part psychoanalyst, and part conjurer, Morris has turned his kaleidoscopic lens on a fascinating array of human enthusiasms, obsessions and fears. Morris's latest film, Standard Operating Procedure, is the result of his investigation into the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal — which was, Morris says, both revealed and concealed by the photographs of sexual sadism, degradation and torture that were broadcast to the world in 2004.

Since the beginning of the U.S. invasion of Iraq five years ago, several films have tackled subjects of the War. Despite blockbuster budgets, star power and even Taxi to the Dark Side's recent Oscar nod, none have taken hold of American imagination. Morris hopes his film's unique approach may have different results: "It goes back to politics," he says. "We live in a world where everybody thinks they know everything. And they know what the arguments are, they've heard the arguments from the Left, they've heard the arguments from the Right, and they're not gonna change what they think... So if the expectation is that you're gonna hear things [in a movie] that you've already put to rest in your own mind, you're not gonna want to go there, just pure and simple. I think I've done something completely different. I think I've told a story about people that were invisible, that we know nothing about, that people are really deeply curious about... You have to convince them in the face of the fact that it's story they may not want to hear. The 'bad apples' serve a social function. I believe they got Bush re-elected in 2004. They gave us someone to blame."

A scene from Standard Operating Procedure Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

In Standard Operating Procedure, Morris brings his entire filmmaking prowess to bear on what he has called his "non-fiction horror movie". The film is a masterfully orchestrated emotional experience, from Danny Elfman's haunting score, to a sound design that augments the subjects' revelatory interviews with gripping, echo-laden effects, to Morris's signature harshly lit re-enactments, shot by award winning cinematographers Robert Chappell and Robert Richardson, and populated by faceless prisoners and CIA interrogators who fade like ghosts from the shots. Morris sees his approach, which draws more on Hollywood convention than documentary tradition, as consistent with the search for truth: "I was trying to make a movie. Because that's what movies are, or certainly that's what movies can be. You know since the very beginning I've tried to challenge our assumptions about what a documentary is or could be. I am very much interested in the idea of truth, but I'm also firmly convinced that truth is not a matter of stylistic convention — it's not a matter of handheld camera, available light, or the absence or presence of sound effects, or the absence or presence of music by Philip Glass, Danny Elfman, Caleb Sampson, or otherwise. It's an underlying quest — I spent years investigating. The movie's a movie."

Morris's interest in the images from Abu Ghraib was piqued, he said, because of an ongoing fascination with the nature of photographs. "I'd been interested in photography, in a certain way — that whole question for me is: 'Do we know what we're looking at when we look at a photograph?' That predates looking at the photographs from Abu Ghraib." But Morris immediately recognized that the photographs of Lynndie England holding a naked Iraqi on a dog leash, and the hooded figure in a Christlike pose with wires attached to his hands would become the iconic images of the war, in much the same way as Mathew Brady's Civil War photos, the pictures of the planting of the American flag at Iwo Jima, or the indelible photo of the point blank execution of Vietcong operative Nguyen Van Lem in Saigon in 1968. "These [Abu Ghraib] photographs are the most seen photographs in history. That picture of [the Iraqi prisoner nicknamed by his captors] 'Gilligan' on the box with wires I dare say has been seen by a billion people." Morris saw an opportunity to investigate the circumstances of these images in a new way, and to explore, through them, the nature of photography in general, and the bedeviled relationship of image to truth. "What if you could walk into a photograph?" he muses, "What if you could walk into history through a photograph? You're not walking into some general story of antecedents and consequence; you're walking into a moment. And what do you see? It refocuses your attention, it refocuses and directs your attention in a very odd and very interesting way."